You may have noticed some periods of instability with our Forum network recently.  This has proved hard to diagnose as one of the first things to be hit would be the management interfaces to our network switches, so that obtaining useful data (indeed, any data at all) during an event was problematic.  However, we believe […]

A big thank you to all of you who took the time to complete the recent survey on the areas of the Informatics Computing Service where mobile (mobile in this context meaning a smartphone or tablet rather than a conventional laptop) support could be improved. 99 people responded and the results make interesting reading. We […]

The University’s license for the Kaspersky Anti-Virus software expires on 30th April 2014. If you are running a copy of Kaspersky on a self-managed machine using the University License, you must remove it manually and replace it. The replacement anti-virus software is System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) which is currently licensed for use on University-owned […]

Windows XP was first launched in 2001 and Microsoft have now withdrawn support for XP as of 8th April. There is a useful page giving full details: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows/end-support-help It does recommend upgrading to Windows 8.1 but you may find that your machine is not capable of running Windows 8 in which case you may prefer […]

As part of our rolling programme of network upgrades and replacement of old kit, the following have either happened or are planned to happen soon: The remaining “gigabit” switches in the Forum will be replaced with current models, completing the process of upgrading these switches which was begun last year.  Ports with labels beginning 4/B, […]

This article describes a couple of security enhancements which the Computing Team will be developing over the next few months. As I mentioned  last time, we have recently started scanning all our externally-visible machines for security vulnerabilities using the JANET ESISS penetration-testing service.  In order to use the service as effectively as possible we need […]

Users of self-managed machines are reminded that School policy requires that they should make all reasonable efforts to secure those machines.  This applies particularly to those which have firewall holes. Machines must be running a current OS version, and patching must be kept up-to-date.  If you have any services running, please make sure that you […]

To aid with a research project by ICSA’s Wireless & Mobile Networking (WiMo) Group, we have asked IS to reconfigure the wireless access points for the top three floors of the Forum temporarily.  For the month of September the 802.11a (5GHz) channels have been turned off on these floors’ APs, to minimise interference with the […]

OpenAFS’s inability to use any encryption type other than single DES in the Kerberos tickets used to authenticate server-server and client-server communications has long been recognised as a major security shortcoming. 1DES’s relatively small key space renders it highly susceptible to a brute force attack and the wide availability of cheap distributed computing power, along […]

capturED is an easy-to-use, cost-effective system for automatically capturing event and lecture presentations, including the facility to broadcast events live online. We have now completed the testing of the CapturED facilities that have been installed in the Forum in G.07 and 4.31. The capturED facility which is provided by IS has been used extensively in […]